It Took Everything



It took everything I had to leave you
Packing up the bits and pieces that remained
Untying the ropes and lines of love and
Shoving away from shore

These past weeks I’ve watched you grow smaller
Waving from a distance, your pale face daily
Losing all its features save one: the sad
Crescent of your mouth

Still, there are lessons I refuse to learn
How to captain a sinking vessel
How to lose gracefully
How not to be loved

Better a ship alone on a trackless ocean
Than a lover alone in a loveless bed
Better to hunger on some lonesome island
Than starve within sight of a feast


©KB 2/04

Comments

  1. Another really thoughtful, nicely-constructed, provocative piece. Have been enjoying the ping-ponging on this blog b/w your interior world and your observations of the exterior world. I've been especially captivated by your descriptions of solitary figures inhabiting harsh worlds; and I guess your interior poems aren't all that different thematically, though very different in their effect.

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    1. Hm. Solitary figures inhabiting harsh worlds--hadn't thought of it that way before, but you're right, there is a theme here. Some of the pieces (Columbus, Toubab Dancer, Raised By Wolves) are meant to be taken lightly; well, they all are, really. But the individuals who stay in my mind's eye are the ones who live among the ruins. African women, Mexican cowboys, dying salmon, jilted lovers. Sounds depressing. It's just life, though. Maybe for a fun exercise I'll write about a community of people inhabiting a comforting world. What would that look like?

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  2. A David Lynch movie.

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